Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey Read Online Free PDF

St. Louis where folks insist on pronouncing the state name Muh-zoo-ree, when those of us on the western side know it’s Muh-zoo-rah — just as it’s soda
pop.
We like onomatopoeia. My old friend Gus Kubitzki, of whom you will hear more later, used to insist the term should be spelled
sodaPOP!
and be pronounced with a click of the tongue as if we were Hottentots. Step into an old soda fountain in Kansas City — should you be determined enough to search out one — and order up a “soda,” and you’ll be asked, “What flavor?” If you then name, say, a cola, you’ll be considered insane, for sodas are made usually with vanilla, chocolate, or strawberry ice cream. Our marriage, thus far, has been able to surmount such linguistic variances, much as a number of marriages in Cincinnati have survived the local pronunciations of the final vowel of their city.
    I was standing among the shelves of “crafts” and looking at the slow blinks of the resident reptile required in these places, this particular critter an iguana. A lanky man whose dark hair belied his nearly seventy years came up to converse: “He’s direct from Mexico. Won’t eat a bug without pepper sauce and a side of tortillas.” The fellow, dentureless, spoke in deep Ozarkian but said he hailed, years past, from Minnesota. He’d been a long-haul trucker who drew good pay, but the work didn’t allow him to put to use his professed master’s degree in archaeology. He asked me, “Got yourself a skull?” I started to say
No, just sawdust up there.
Then I noticed he was displaying for me a cow skull painted with a desert scene in colors unknown to nature but available on the hood of a stock car or in a peyote-induced dream.
    I said I didn’t need any wall art but I could use some information an archaeologist might know. He changed from clerk to professor when I asked if the creek across the road was the Ouachita River. “That’s her,” he said, “and right here’s where she heads up.” He waved toward the front window. “You go a few steps on west, and the water there runs down the other side of the mountain plumb into Oklahoma. This here’s a pass.”
    Curious how far his knowledge reached, I asked where the Ouachita went to. “Down the mountain,” he said. How far? “I know she gets over to Hot Springs, but after that I cain’t say. Maybe she just gets soaked up in them springs, and that’s all she wrote.”
    We conducted this conversation while he trailed me around the store. In walking from the east-side shelves of cedar boxes and onyx ashtrays to the lima-bean shelf on the west, we’d walked halfway across town: the store and a couple of attendant buildings
are
Rich Mountain, Arkansas. Just beyond the bean cans, effectively the town line, was a domino game where a trio of elders — each accoutred with a mug of cold coffee, a butt-filled ashtray, and an abacus to tally points — sat at an old, rough-sawn wooden table with one chair empty for whoever might turn up next. Over the years, the sliding of the tiles into play at the center of the table had worn through the yellowed enamel-paint and into the wood to create a shadow of a Celtic cross or, to change cultures, the figure of the Zia on the flag of New Mexico, an emblem of light and friendship. I pointed it out to Q who saw the cruciform in the table as a quilt-block design. And it was that too.
    The room, with its shelved goods and artless crafts, was turned into an authentic country-store — that abused term of our time — by the domino game, for without it you would have an auto without an engine, a pen without ink, a torso without a heart.
    Sometimes a good journey is like stepping into an empty chamber of blank walls, which the traveler is free to make into his own space by appointing it with representative furniture and accent pieces found en route. For my Ouachita room, I’d come upon a graven table. It is just such a quoz that a traveler can carry away into